I Am So Excited to Share This Book With You

I am so excited, more than I’ve been about anything I’ve written, to tell you that my new novel, Where You Will Not Look, is out in the world.

This book has lived inside me for a long time. I rewrote it more times than I can count. I cut it, rebuilt it and argued with it at midnight. Now it’s finished, and I can’t wait for you to read it.

What it’s about

It’s 1198, in the harbor city of Acre. A boy with blue dye under his fingernails walks through a blue door at dusk and asks an old man one question:

“Is it true you found the Tree of Wisdom?”

The old man is Daniel. Forty years earlier he was a clerk who counted other men’s gold and lived a life of ledgers and safe routines. He couldn’t cross his own street for twenty-three years. Then he wrote three words in a ledger that were not true, and that small lie sent him out of the city and across deserts, cities and mountains, chasing a legend.

Along the way he meets strangers who become his teachers, friends who tell him hard truths, and a rival whose hunger for wisdom hides a deeper wound. He also carries a brass compass that belonged to his father, and its needle has never once pointed north.

I won’t tell you what Daniel finds at the top of the mountain. I’ll only say the boy came for directions and the old man hands him a blank map instead.

Why this one matters so much to me

I’ve written books on medicine and on women’s hearts. This is the first time I’ve written the book that sits underneath all of them.

As a cardiologist, I’ve learned that the thing breaking someone’s heart is almost never far away. It isn’t in another city or another life. It’s at their own kitchen table, in the room down the hall, in the phone call they keep not making. The hardest place to look is the one closest to the heart.

Where You Will Not Look is a parable in the tradition of The Alchemist, but it’s a story about coming home rather than setting out. It’s about the fathers we’re afraid of becoming and the mothers who keep a lamp lit in the window for years. It’s about the marriage that survives the man who wandered off to find himself, and a third cup set at a table for someone who may never come back.

I wrote it for anyone still walking the long way around.

A few lines from the book

“The first line is never where you think it is.”

“Because I believed what you believe. That the true road was anywhere but where I was standing.”

“The road came later. It was the easy part.”

“Maps are for places. And the Tree was never a place.”

“Start with the true thing.”

Two book clubs have already picked it

Within days of launch, two book clubs scheduled Where You Will Not Look for upcoming meetings. That means more to me than any ranking. This is a book meant to be talked about over coffee or wine, with someone across the table saying, “That part was about my father.”

If your book club is looking for its next read, reply to this email. I’d love to join your discussion, in person if you’re in LA or by Zoom if you’re not.

Get your copy

👉 Buy Where You Will Not Look on Amazon

One small favor that matters more than you know

If you read it, please leave a review on Amazon. Even one or two honest sentences help. For an independent author, reviews are how a book finds the next reader who needs it.

It takes sixty seconds:

1. Go to the book’s Amazon page

2. Scroll down to “Write a customer review”

3. Tell the next reader what stayed with you

Then do one more thing that would make my year: give a copy to the person your heart went to while you were reading.

You’ll know who it is. It’s probably the one you’ve been not looking at.

With gratitude,
Ash

Afshine Emrani, MD, FACC